


That Long Black Cloud is Coming Down

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-13 05:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16011644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: put my guns in the groundi can't shoot them anymore





	That Long Black Cloud is Coming Down

**Author's Note:**

> hi i felt sad and wanted to take you all with me  
> not edited nearly as much as usual cause I didn't like looking at it so pardon the mistakes
> 
> summary and title from Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door (which you straight up cannot find a youtube video of because Bobby boy's copyright lawyers are good and annoy me)  
> written to Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead

Echoes from explosions bounced off of the walls of the canyon, interspersed with the near constant crack of gunfire. The little zips from pulse fire were quieter but still faintly reached McCree’s ears.

He was sitting, leaning against a brick chimney on the roof of some abandoned building that had been nearly destroyed. It was supposed to be an easy mission - a cache of pre-Disbandment weapons and technology that had been hidden away, only discovered when Winston was cataloguing safe houses. Four agents in and out, with a ship to haul away everything they could.

Then they showed, the figures in black and red. Talon, somehow. Somehow they knew. That was a breach in security that was really going to stick in Morrison’s craw. Yeah, Winston was technically their leader but everyone knew who Soldier: 76 was and why he was so angry, though most of the group didn’t understand why he refused to step up and take back leadership.

McCree understood. He understood the freedom of being able to just be a fighter, after having been in command and held so many lives in his hands. He might have been Reyes’ second, but at the end he and Ana had to step up and manage their groups as Reyes and Morrison fought the world and each other for their right to exist. They would sit together on a bench outside that they had claimed as their own, McCree with his cigar and Ana with her evil little black cigarettes, and smoke and drink and not talk. McCree would wonder how he ended up here, practically in charge of a black ops organization at just past thirty, when he had expected to be dead at seventeen. He never knew quite what Ana was thinking, but he was sure it had something to do with being surrounded by men who thought with their dicks and their guns, leaving her to pick up the pieces. She wasn’t wrong, of course. They still had to keep going.

A roar and a flash of green - Genji was bringing out the big guns, so to speak. McCree had been glad to see him, when they were recalled. He’d left Blackwatch before McCree did, apparently traveling the world as some sort of wandering samurai type of deal. He came back more content, calmer. Maybe he was just older, they all were, but perhaps he really had found an inner peace. McCree closed his eyes and took a careful breath. He could use some of that peace.

That was why he was up here, of course, while his teammates were all half a mile away at this point, following Talon and trying to get their weapons back. His hands were pressed to his stomach, his metal arm locked over the flesh one so it wouldn’t move. He wished that his metal hand was on the bottom, then he wouldn’t feel the slippery coils of things that shouldn’t be outside his body.

The worst part was that he didn’t even see who had done it. He and Lena had been back to back in the stairwell, him firing upwards and her downwards. Genji and Morrison were somewhere below, searching for the cache. Their information said it was on the top floor, but Morrison was sure that it had been moved.

A crackle from the comm and Morrison’s guttural voice in their ears saying that they had the cache and were moving it into the ship. McCree and Lena looked at each other for just a moment, just long enough for the enemy agents to realize the game had changed. It was a mad rush of chaos, everyone both fighting and trying to get to the bottom floor. McCree hadn’t moved, thinking he could pick off opponents better if they were all clustered in front of him.

There was a quick line of fire across his belly - intentional or a ricochet, he couldn’t tell. He kept firing, until the bodies were so piled up he couldn’t see past the doorway to the next level. He had paused, reloading one two three four in movements that were second-nature. He cocked his head to listen for sounds of fighting, and it was all floors and floors below him.

McCree took a breath, and found himself sitting on the landing with no recollection of how he got there. He’d looked down at himself, unable to see much past the chest armor. He could feel the wetness, though, hot fluid rapidly cooling as it soaked through his shirt and pants. He stumbled upstairs, a faint idea of being able to be evacuated from the roof once the fighting stopped. It was darker than he expected up there - storm clouds having moved in while he was inside.

He leaned against the chimney - the building was too big for a chimney, maybe a heating duct? Some kind of ventilation? - and by the time he got his hazy thoughts in order he was sitting, legs splayed out like a broken doll. Going against every instinct he had while on the battlefield, he reached up and hit the releases for his chest armor. A groan was pulled out of him from deep inside when the armor no longer supported him. He felt a rush of wet heat, of things pushing out at the red hot edges of his flesh.

McCree pushed a hand under, trying to put pressure on before anything else happened. He managed to get the armor off, not that it had done much good. The shot had gone in at his side where there was no metal and the armor was thinner, finding a seam to punch through like it was aimed there. The armor had done its job, not letting bullets through. In this case, it kept it inside of him, ricocheting through meat until it found its wending way out the other side. McCree was left with a deep ragged opening crossing him as neatly as if Genji had sliced him with his sword.

It didn’t smell like anything was perforated, but it’s not like he would live long enough for infection to be an issue. Between the blood he left on the stairs and the creeping pool surrounding him now, he was pretty sure he knew how he would go. Alone and bloodless, on a rooftop in the middle of a canyon.

McCree blinked his eyes open from where they had slid shut at the sound of breaking stone. The edge of the canyon that was jutted out into an overhang was slowly crumbling, nearly a mile away. Lena must have pulled out one of her pulse bombs, he couldn’t think of anything else that would do that type of damage. They were all so far away from him, now.

It was because he was looking and trying to estimate how distant his teammates might be that he saw it at all. A trickle of black, coming up over the edge of the building just at the fringe of his peripheral vision. It moved towards him like a flash flood, shooting upwards when ten feet away to coalesce into a tall, black figure. McCree squinted up at him, the black-bottomed thunderheads in the sky providing an appropriately atmospheric background.

“Hey there, Reaper. Always wondered if we’d meet.” He had heard of the Talon-affiliated vigilante, he was hard to miss when he kept taking out Overwatch agents. Nearly everyone had been attacked by him at one point or another - it was pretty much an inside joke at this point that if Morrison was on a mission, Reaper would follow. McCree had never seen him, though. Not in person.

He waited. The man just stood there, clawed hands at his side and bone face tilted down towards McCree. He couldn’t see any weapons, couldn’t see the shotguns that he was infamous for. He idly wondered where he kept them. Back holster? In the short video clips and pictures he’d seen it looked like he’d pulled them from thin air.

McCree let his head fall forward. “Either kill me or sit down, my neck hurts lookin’ up at you.” He hadn’t expected anything to happen, but a metal-clad foot nudged a broken chunk of building to make sure it wouldn’t crumble or topple. Reaper sat, coat flared out around his makeshift chair with a nearly delicate movement, one leg stretched out in front while the other remained bent with hands clasped around the knee.

“If you are going to kill me, I’d get on with it. I doubt I have much time left,” McCree said with a grin, aware of the blood coating his teeth.

Reaper merely cocked his head. McCree continued: “You’ve certainly taken out enough Overwatch agents over the years. Were you part of us, once upon a time? That why you hate us so much? I know you’ve got it in for Morrison, but either you like playing with him or you’re not as good of a killer as everyone says because he’s still kickin’.” He waved a blood-slick hand at the canyon. “If you start now you could probably catch him before they get back to the ship.”

Another full minute of silence, where McCree tried to breathe through the bubbling he was starting to feel in his lungs and Reaper sat as still as the grave. McCree thought he was looking at him, there was nothing else to look at up here other than brick and blood and his slowly dying body. He couldn’t tell, though, with the black eyeholes of that mask. This close it really did look like bone. He wondered what it was made of.

His wandering thoughts were brought abruptly into line by the slight movement of the mask in front of him.

“Jack and Ana didn’t tell you.”

McCree stared, not breathing, completely still. He could feel the trickle of blood from around his fingers. The sound was smokey, full of echoes, but he knew that voice. Knew it giving orders, yelling, laughing, sobbing, moaning in his ear. Whatever damage had been done couldn’t disguise it that much.

“...Are you dead? Were you dead?” Maybe this was all a hallucination brought on by blood loss.

The mask tilted. “Yes and no. To both questions. No one is sure what I am, now. Not even me.”

“Jack and Ana. Knew you were...you.”

“Just like you recognized me as soon as I spoke, so did they.”

“They didn’t tell me.”

“Apparently not.”

“ _You_ didn’t tell me.”

Silence.

“I’d wondered. Why you had attacked every other Overwatch agent but me. Going after Morrison time and time again, even on missions that I was on, but I never saw you. Why?”

More silence, lengthening for a full minute. Or perhaps it just felt that way, time was starting to feel stretchy to McCree. “You know why.”

“I mourned you, y'know. Jack and Ana came back and I thought maybe, maybe. If he survived that explosion, maybe you did too. But time went on and you never showed...some point I just gave up hope.”

Thin tendrils of smoke constantly twined upwards, barely able to be seen against the dark thundercloud background. Were they part of him, whatever his body was now? How had this transformation even happened?

“I never stopped loving you.” McCree almost missed the quiet remark, mesmerized by the smoke. That...hurt. More than the gut shot. Somewhere deeper, in his heart or maybe his soul.

“We could...we could have…”

“No, we couldn’t. Not like I am now. I... didn’t want you to see me, like _this_.” It was the most expression McCree had heard from the ethereal voice yet.

“It doesn’t matter, what you look like. It never did. It wasn’t about the sex, it was about you, being with me. Just...being.”

“It’s a two-way street, Jesse. You don’t get to ignore that. Why did _you_ leave?”

The only sounds were the gurgling in McCree’s lungs and the roll of thunder from overhead. Fat drops of rain started to fall, making small marks in the pools of congealing blood.

“I woke up one morning to find you gone and your things cleared out and I didn’t understand why, and a day later I was blown to pieces. Why did you _leave_ me?” The last words broke, emotion shattering on vocal cords no longer made for it.

McCree looked up, into Reaper’s face. He peered into the eyeholes, straining for something, anything familiar. “Gabe?” The question was small and quiet, like a lost child might ask.

Reaper waited for a continuation, for an answer, for anything. Instead he got eyes that were staring into his without blinking, a chest that didn’t rise.

He spent a minute more not moving, hoping somewhere deep in the dried out husk of his chest that it was just a delay, just a pause before the next sentence. The rainfall grew heavier, making tracks like tears through the blood and dust on McCree’s face. Reaper stood, looking down on the broken figure before him.

Bending down, he pulled McCree over, laying him out flat. He moved his arms, still covering the wound for a last bit of dignity, but folded over more carefully on his stomach. He unwound the serape from his shoulders, shaking it out before draping it over him like a shroud. He didn’t cover his face yet, letting his claws trace over the features in front of him. More lines, more grey. A hard life shown in crevices and scars. Reaper tilted McCree’s head to the side, as he had done a thousand times before to steal a kiss or whisper in his ear. This time, he reached with clawed fingers and delicately plucked the communications unit from his ear.

Reaper brought it up to his own ear, shifting the mask slightly so he could fit it in. He heard nothing, and pulled it away to poke at a switch before putting it back. Now there was crackling, various voices that he recognized from a lifetime ago asking for status updates, where was McCree, where was Jesse.

“Jack.” The line fell silent as his rasp transmitted. “The kid is dead.” A pause. “I didn’t do it.”

Dead air, then a tired sigh. “I know you wouldn’t. Where are you?” The question faded into thin air as Reaper pulled the earpiece away. He looked at it carefully, before pressing a small, recessed red button. If they hadn’t changed their technology too much, it should transmit McCree’s location.

Reaper tossed it aside to fall onto cement, before kneeling down, ignoring the puddle of blood his knee landed in. He took one last look, combing McCree’s hair back with clawed fingers before pulling the serape up over his face, protecting him from the rain. He stood, holding McCree’s hat. With a few dainty slices he cut away the bronze decoration at the front of it. He held it in his hand a moment - it was something like an upside-down Overwatch symbol, something like what he had hanging from his own belt.

With a few flicks Reaper undid the strap at his waist, threading the metal emblem to hang in front of the silver one already there. Looking down, it stood out - bright warm bronze against the black and red and silver of the rest. He set the hat on McCree’s chest, stepping away.

A stream of black smoke streaked down the side of the building, surging across the rain-soaked desert until it stopped at a motorcycle hidden in the shadow of a building. Black leather streamed in the wind as it raced away from the broken buildings at high speed, while on the other side of the town a white ship sped towards the signal flashing on their screens.

On top of a crumbled building, blood washed away in the rain.


End file.
